If you’ve been to Kitchen Dog Theater, odds are one of your most vivid memories is of a woman with a cocked eyebrow and a sly smile shouting, “A big Texas howd-y-y-y!” before the show even starts.

Only Tina Parker can make a curtain speech a comic highlight of a theatrical evening.

The only good thing about an evening where she doesn’t appear in the curtain-opener is that it probably means she’s actually performing in the evening’s play. Given that Parker is one of the area’s most gifted actresses, and that she doesn’t get onstage nearly as often as her fans would like, you’re probably in for an even bigger treat.

Such a treat is in store beginning Friday, when Parker takes on her first stage role in two years, Meena in Kate Fodor’s satirical comedy RX.

Parker quips that she always knows “it’s time to act again when a person comes up to me and asks me if I’ve ever thought about being in a play.”

So is the real Tina Parker anything like the good-time party girl with the thick Texas accent who delivers those curtain speeches as if she were ironically addressing a convention of drunken frat boys venturing out to a theater for the very first time? You wouldn’t think so, conversing with this thoughtful artist-administrator who runs Kitchen Dog with her fellow co-artistic director, Christopher Carlos.

“I think the tone of the curtain speech happened because of nerves,” Parker says. “I’m only like that otherwise when I go to the State Fair and talk to Big Tex.”

Kitchen Dog managing director Elizabeth Kegley suggests, though, that the public persona isn’t all that different from the woman she works with daily.

“Tina really is the face of this company,” Kegley says. “She’s really funny, but wonderfully intelligent and hard-working. Every person who comes to the theater seems to know her – and she knows them and all about them, too. So much is up in that vault – which is what I call Tina’s brain – and I have to get it out of storage to learn to do my job.”

The recent two-year hiatus is longer than she, let alone her audience, considers ideal – but consider everything else Parker has been doing lately. In addition to being one of Dallas’ best actors, she’s one of our best directors – and she’s staging two shows during the current Kitchen Dog season.

Then there’s her screen work. She has had a continuing role on the Emmy-winning Breaking Bad as Francesca, the shady lawyer’s secretary. She was Bobby Ewing’s nurse during the first season of the new version of Dallas. And she plays a role in the upcoming movie blockbuster The Lone Ranger.

“That movie cost $200 million and you can see every dollar onscreen,” Parker says. “There was a whole hangar filled with 1800s-style costumes, and those were just for the extras. I got escorted in to where my own costume had been created special, down to the undergarments.”

Of course, she has been artistic administrator of Kitchen Dog for years, and the details involved in running a theater company are enormous. The organization brought in Kegley last year in part to help her out, but both women say that most of Kegley’s time is spent doing things that the company had always intended to do but never had the staff for, such as mining data about patrons and donors.

Administration is not something Parker ever wanted to do, but she says she has been willing to devote herself to it because she believes so passionately in her company’s mission and in its artistic results. She says she sees a lot of herself in the character she’s playing in RX, Meena – a published poet who works as an editor of a trade journal to keep bread on the table. Meena has developed workplace depression and gets into a drug trial for the condition.

“The play pokes some good jabs at the health-care system and the pharmaceutical industry,” Parker says. “We’re just getting to that stage in rehearsals when we hope that it’s funny. It’s a comedy, but at Kitchen Dog you know it’s going to be a comedy with teeth.”

And if it’s got Tina Parker in it, it’s a safe bet that this comedy is likely to be very funny indeed.

Plan your life

Friday through April 27 at the McKinney Avenue Contemporary (the MAC), 3120 McKinney Ave., Dallas. $15 to $30. 214-953-1055. kitchendogtheater.org.

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About Lawson Taitte

Lawson has been writing about Texas theater since 1974, when he started writing for Texas Monthly. He was its statewide theater, music and dining critic during the magazine's early years. After that, he wrote for D Magazine, doing two stints as its dining critic, and frequently contributed the New York Times Book Review. He also had his own program, "Critic at Large," on WRR-FM from 1984 to 1992 and did critiques and interviews about all the arts, from dance and visual arts to movies. (He covered the Dallas gallery scene and the local classical scene more thoroughly than anybody else in those years, and was a founding member of the Dallas Fort Worth Theater Critics Forum.) He came to the Morning News in 1992 and became theater critic in 1996.

Hometown: Harlingen, TX

Education: Lawson has a B.A. from Rice University and a Ph.D. from Princeton University (on a theater-related topic), and edited nearly 20 annual volumes of the Andrew R. Cecil Lectures on Moral Values in a Free Society at the University of Texas at Dallas.